


The Lure

by gyromitra



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, One-Shot, Word salad, and unhealthy relationships, but mermaids, mermaid!au, there is character death, there is miniscule gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 20:53:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9256859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyromitra/pseuds/gyromitra
Summary: A take on Mermaid!AU. One-shot.Mermaids do not fall in love with mortals. Selkies are not chained to their skins and furs. Sirens, oh, the sirens do fade to sea foam bathed in a morning sun, but were they ever anything more than that?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Mood-setting song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cWo2-IgMg

Mermaids do not fall in love with mortals. Selkies are not chained to their skins and furs. Sirens, oh, the sirens do fade to sea foam bathed in a morning sun, but were they ever anything more than that?

*

When Gabriel meets Jack for the first time, every fiber of his instinct screams danger. Jack is white, blonde, blue-eyed and his voice is deep – flows like a honey straight from a honeycomb, sugar over a dark promise.

But it is the smile that is something downright predatory. No one else seems to mind. They call it charming.

*

Sometimes Gabriel wonders if ‘Jack’ ever existed. There are no records from his birth to graduation.

“There was really bad fire,” the blonde explains. “City hall and school burned down. And city hall was practically in the clinic.”

The fire checks out.

*

They get a week of leave approved and strict instructions not to divulge anything about the program.

“Come home with me,” Jack offers and for a moment Gabriel thinks it means something entirely else. “Few days on the farm in Indiana sun, we’ve got a lake close by. What do you say?”

A trap is most likely, but pinned by the blue eyes – blue just like sea ensnared in tropical caves – he hears himself inexplicably say yes.

*

Gabriel meets Jack’s family. Older sister, Jennifer. Younger brother, Steven. Mother, Celeste. Father, Jonathan. They look and act real, welcome them both. It’s Jack that stands out, like cut from a different cloth, and there is an undercurrent of deception in his smiles.

*

The lake isn’t something spectacular, but when the morning sun hits the surface, it looks like a certain luminosity comes from the bottom, and Jack, standing in water, beckons him, smile for once gentle.

They kiss underwater.

“You know, old people say it connects to the ocean,” the blonde talks when they rest on a blanket by the shore. “They say that sea-folk sometimes come here and maybe even walk on legs with land dwellers.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Maybe,” Jack rolls to his side and props himself on elbow. His eyes seem to study him, and Gabriel feels unnerved.

*

Time to leave comes. Jack waits for him by the car down the road and Celeste sits in the shadow of the veranda. Around her neck coils a string of irregular pearls.

“I know your kind. You do right by my boy,” she states while the air wavers almost like water in the summer heat.

“I don’t…” Gabriel starts, but Celeste interrupts him.

“I know your kind,” she repeats and waves him off.

*

They return to training and injections. Summer days become a distant memory. Celeste’s words haunt Gabriel still.

‘ _You do right by my boy._ ’

But Jack isn’t a boy. Gabriel doubts he ever was.

*

When he sees Jack laugh at the man flirting with him, Gabriel feels something dark settle in his chest, just below his beating heart. It stays there even if the blonde’s eyes hardly ever leave his.

That night he has Jack singing under him. Later he dreams of inky blackness where silvery shapes pass him by.

*

He spends some time researching. Somehow, Gabriel thinks, all those stories are wrong, because sirens do walk the land.

But they are predatory things that lure the unsuspecting with their songs, that toy with their prey, and wait before dealing the killing blow. They feed on human flesh.

*

They work well together. Gabriel wakes up one night with his head cradled in Jack’s lap and the gentle song is all he can hear. Stars shine above them.

“You should rest,” the blonde murmurs, deft fingers combing his hair, soothing. “You are hurt.”

Soft sounds lull him to sleep again, pain gone, and he dreams of sun-kissed sargassum forests.

*

Jack’s father passes away. It is but a small miracle he is allowed a day to attend the funeral. When he asks Gabriel to accompany him, he agrees. His leave is approved too.

The ceremony is small and private. Later, Jack converses with his siblings while Celeste sits in her chair on the veranda. She has dark circles under her eyes but when she notices him, she stands up and clutches his shirt in her shivering hands.

“You do right by him, remember,” she pleads with Gabriel.

“She won’t last long,” Jack mentions mournfully on the way back.

*

Month later Celeste is declared missing. Her pearls are found by the lake. Divers discover nothing.

“We already said our goodbyes,” Jack responds when inquired.

*

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, not at all, but Gabriel still feels this dark thing in his chest grow when Jack’s appointment is announced. The blonde sends him worried glances, but he steels himself.

Jack is good with people, he is a siren after all. His words are always a song, a sweet seductive tilt that has everyone on the edge of their seats, ready to please, ready to serve, but under that honey lies a deep rot of seaweed and wood, dead fish and drowned sailors. Gabriel hears it. He hates it.

*

They slowly drift away. Jack tries to reconcile. Gabriel rebuffs him.

The flicker of hurt in Jack’s blue eyes pains him.

*

Gabriel needs to remind himself that the person, no, the thing, that lies below him in a growing pool of blood, is a monster. It isn’t human.

Jack’s breaths grow labored and his eyes dim, yet he smiles against the barrel of the shotgun.

“You know… the sirens, to walk on land,” Jack’s voice catches in his throat. “They have to give something up…”

The dark thing around his heart twists and he kneels by the blonde, gun all but forgotten.

“What did you give up?”

No answer comes and the building collapses on them.

*

When he comes to, Gabriel knows he himself is a monster now. He sustains himself on something he doesn’t understand – a flicker of life, a bite of flesh, a scrap of memories.

Under a guise of night, he visits his own grave. He visits Jack’s grave next and traces his claw along the broken slab, the jagged line cutting the name in two.

*

After a year, he comes back. The stone is repaired. Gabriel leaves water lilies on it.

*

Next anniversary, the stone is broken again and painted in lines of garish colors. Gabriel scatters yellow snowflakes around and sits down.

“What was the thing you gave up?” He asks the air and expects no answer.

*

It continues and each time the dark thing that clutches his still heart fills him more and more.

*

It’s a shock, but no surprise. The monsters are notoriously hard to kill, he himself is a testament to that simple truth, and this one before him smiles with a strange sincere melancholy.

“Gabriel,” Jack acknowledges him.

“I will tear out your beating heart!” Gabriel snarls, claws poised over the blonde’s chest.

“That’s what you want. Do it.” This is a song, he realizes, one he hadn’t heard before, not aimed at himself, a sweet soothing trill of sun and wind ruffling waves, whales and dolphins playing together, and, above all, a promise of coming home, all honey and no bitterness hidden underneath.

Gabriel struggles, his hand twitching, metal sinking deeper into leather. With a howl, he tears away and almost slips.

“Why won’t you? This is what you want, isn’t it? This is what you need,” Jack presses. When Gabriel doesn’t respond, he just shakes his head, turning away. “I liked the flowers.”

*

Jack sits by the corpse, his hands and face bloodied, and Amelie’s chest is clawed open, her heart missing from the gaping maw between her stretched ribs. The blonde tries to wipe his lips with his wrist.

“Sirens are territorial. They won’t suffer another after their chosen prey,” Jack looks back at him, and Gabriel feels his dead heart beat once, twice, and then still again. “Old people sometimes say that if you taste siren’s flesh, you’re going to live forever. But they say many things, don’t they?”

That night, curled in the embrace of a song, with blue of the sea looking over him and the silver of the moon calling him home, Gabriel sleeps for the first time in years. He dreams of sun, waves and an old rickety wooden landing.

*

But that dark thing piercing his heart is still there, still nestled, and it moans with pleasure rolling like storm waves when Jack falters, his hand clutching at his stomach as if trying to keep the blood in, red seeping through his fingers and blue eyes bleeding ocean water.

“Gabe,” he begs, looking up at him. “Sirens turn into sea foam, but they don’t have to. They don’t have to…” He calls him again as he stumbles over the edge of the cliff, and Gabriel isn’t fast enough, he never is, and Jack is falling, falling, and he is too slow, always too slow with his hand reaching out.

Sea foam below turns crimson.

*

Gabriel cradles the broken body to his chest and the darkness inside of him is quiet now, waiting, apprehensive. It is still there, clinging to the blonde’s skin - a flicker of life, a bite of flesh, a scrap of memories. A soul. A heart.

But Gabriel thinks he understands Celeste now. There is no use in coming home, not anymore, if home was a person. The depths will never feel welcome to him again.

‘ _I know your kind. You do right by my boy. You do right by him, remember._ ‘

‘ _You will not take him!_ ’

He will not take him. So he kisses pale lips once and then lies Jack down, with waves nipping playfully at his cheek.

Gabriel returns to the sea as dawn breaks over the horizon.

*

When he breaks the surface, Gabriel comes to a stop, with sun and sea above him.

“Are you a mermaid?” The boy curiously asks. “You’re not selkie,” he adds.

Gabriel laughs, touching lightly a hand that trails in the water.

“Will you love me?” He sings, with sweet voice of a shimmering stream and a promise of quiet afternoons shared together.

“Oh, a song, you’re a siren!” The boy sits up, looking at him, excited. “Mom says I got her voice, she taught me her songs.”

“A siren, yes.” Gabriel reaches up, his fingers leaving droplets of water on the fair skin of the boy’s cheek. “Will you love me?” It is a simple question now, no undercurrent of deception or treachery in his voice.

“I could,” the boy confirms. “But mom says you have to give something up, something as big as what you want.”

Gabriel knows, and he understands what he asks.

“My memories.”

“But how can I love you, if you don’t remember me?”

“As long as you love me, we will meet,” Gabriel smiles, his eyes moving to a woman running, screaming, and his world dissolves.

“You will not take him!” She bellows.

*

Dark foam clings desperately to the body left on the shore. Come another day, it is gone.

*

What are sirens if not sea foam at the mercy of the ocean’s fancies?

**Author's Note:**

> The Lure – taken from a movie that should more accurately be titled as ‘The Daughters of the Danceparty’ in English – ‘Córki Dancingu’ where dance party is ‘Dancing’ – nigh impossible to translate what kind of party ‘Dancing’ is. Watch the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5278832/ - it’s, kind of, a musical. It’s a mermaid movie. It’s fucking good. No, the story doesn’t spoil the movie, not in the slightest, maybe except the part where I wanted more ‘realistic’ mermaids.


End file.
